Here's a handy map of our solar system that puts it in proper perspective. Mashable pointed out that Voyager 1 Got to Deep Space on Less Memory Than Your iPhone 5. And our favorite Voyager-related Tweet was from James R. Davenport: "@NASAVoyager changes relationship status from "With Sol" to "It's Complicated.""

This week was the 2013 Ig Nobel Awards ceremony at Harvard, where the geekerati gathered to Celebrate Science's Wacky Side. Scicurious will be blogging about the various individual prizes, as is her usual wont. First up: the 2013 Ig Nobel for Public Health: Reattachment of the penis. Unless it was first eaten by a duck.

The Hunt for Microscopic Black Holes. Finding micro black holes at the LHC would alert scientists to the existence of extra dimensions, which might explain why gravity seems so weak.

Some people have no shame. Hucksters are hawking what they claim to be scraps from the LHC that supposedly have acquired healing powers by being near the places where the Higgs Boson were detected: try a ball bearing ($199) or random bolt or nut ($149).

Waxbows: The Incredible Beauty of a Blown Out Candle: "In 2009, aspiring science photographer Grover Schrayer took a series of photos documenting candle smoke–something that most people have seen before, but never looked close enough at. ... There is so much more to a candle once you blow it out."

Chinese Researchers Make An Invisibility Cloak In 15 Minutes. Look out for mass-produced invisibility cloaks thanks to an entirely new way of designing and manufacturing them out of materials such as Teflon.

Contest winner announced for "Why Particle Physics Matters." The readers have spoken: Your favorite explanation of why particle physics matters came from physicist Breese Quinn, who said about public support for particle physics research: "You are the Ferdinands and Isabellas."

Wide Left: Study Shows that Holders Play Key Role in Field Goal Accuracy. "When the field goals are made, kickers are heroes. When they miss, they’re goats. But a study by aerospace researchers shows that kickers aren’t always at fault – the way the ball is held can affect where the ball goes."

How is the sequester affecting science in America? "As predicted, labs are ditching projects and scientists; researchers are looking overseas for jobs and funding; health initiatives are being hamstrung; and federal agencies across the board are floundering."

Remember last week's story about the London building with the death ray that actually melted a car? The Internet had a lot of fun with that this week: host Huw James of Head SqueezeMelted a Toy Car with a Parabolic Mirror. Also, Jen-Luc's fave new site, The Toast, weighed in with a mock interview with London's Death Ray Architect.

Smart Helmets and Brain Scans Test Brain Safety in Youth and High School Football./news/519061/brain-injury-study-tracks-footballs-youngest-players/

Autistic boy genius, 15, pursues physics passion at Waterloo's Perimeter Institute. "In my opinion, autism is just a sense of focus," Jacob said. "I've seen some autistic people who end up becoming very successful engineers, very successful computer scientists and if you narrow what it is they're doing you will see amazing things."

Credit: Martin Klimas, http://www.martin-klimas.de/en/index.html

High Speed Flower Explosions by Martin Klimas: "the artist first soaked them in liquid nitrogen to ensure the petals were brittle as eggshells and then blasted them from behind with an air gun resulting in dazzling bursts of color."

Many are called, but few are chosen. More than 200,000 people applied for a one-way mission to colonize Mars. Only a few dozen will make the cut.

The NSA Hasn’t “Cracked” Encryption—It’s Just Reminded Us of the Ways Around It. New details of the NSA’s capabilities suggest encryption can still be trusted. But more effort is needed to fix problems with how it is used.

Dark matter theory gets a big boost from a new study of where the unseen material is hiding. Then again, per this article, one line of evidence for dark matter may be based on some dubious math.

A Numerical Love Story: Daniel Tammet's Thinking in Numbers. ‘There is no such thing that half of it is nothing."

The Leidenfrost Maze: made by University of Bath undergrads to demonstrate self-propulsion of Leidenfrost droplets:

On The Big Bang Theory, Helping Physics and Fiction Collide: a Q&A with co-executive producer Eric Kaplan. "Listen, it’s a story, not a thesis about how everyone is. It’s a collection of specific characters. All scientists are not Sheldon Cooper, who finds it difficult to hug someone or go out to lunch and divide a check. But many people whose cognitive ability outstrips their emotional sense can see some aspect of Sheldon in themselves."

As he was deciding where to go to college, a depressed Murray Gell-Mann found himself torn between going to MIT or committing suicide. Fortunately for the field of physics, "It occurred to me that I could try MIT and THEN commit suicide...."

How to argue properly: this was a week-long series in the Guardian by one Protagorus, "the pseudonym of an academic or academics researching and teaching rhetoric and politics in Britain." It should be required reading for everyone on the Internet. I mean it. Part 1: The internet provides ample space for stating opinions. But true persuasion is an art. Part 2: How to judge your audience and remain true to your arguments. Being two-faced has had a bad rap recently. But to convince people of your argument you have to adapt it to your audience. Part 3: How to use your anecdotes well. There's an art to telling stories to complement an argument without overdoing it. Part 4: Ask yourself: what are you arguing about? Life is not a well-set exam – the questions we ask may be ambiguous. Defining the dispute is itself part of the argument. Part 5: Can you spot a rhetorical fallacy? If you can identify the fallacies in arguments, you can undermine your opponent and demonstrate your own decency.

A new paper on the arXiv suggests our universe may contain TARDIS-like regions of spacetime. Per io9: "According to Mikko Lavinto and colleagues, the universe isn’t actually expanding. It only looks that way from our perspective. Our view of the cosmos, they argue, is the product of an optical illusion created by regions of space that are bigger on the inside than they appear on the outside. Inspired by Doctor Who’s TARDIS, they’ve dubbed this the Cosmological Tardis Model (also described as a “Swiss Cheese” model of the universe littered with “inhomogeneous holes”)."

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